IGN Presents: The History of Tomb Raider

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Presenting Lara Croft and the Franchise of Destiny.

By Rus McLaughlin

It was a man's world. But it was nothing, not one little thing, without a woman and her guns.

921159.html" >Lara Croft is the First Lady of gaming, the face on a fifty billion dollar franchise, a character so iconic she handily eclipses the very games that feature her. She's a beacon for post-feminist independence and a sophomoric pin-up fantasy, all in one ass-kicking, mouth-watering package. Sex, danger, mystery... Lara carries it all, and she does it all with English class.

Because past the magazine covers, commercials, comic books and Hollywood blockbusters, Lara's just a simple girl who's happiest when crawling through a crumbling Aztec temple loaded with instantly lethal booby-traps. Her adventures might be straight out of the best pulp cliffhangers, but when Lara Croft leapt her first bottomless chasm, the future had arrived, and every other blood-and-guts action hero had catching up to do.

This lady was no tourist.

Not Just a Pretty Face

Core Design made a reputation on delivering simple, solid games in any genre you liked. Side-scrolling combat, point-and-click adventure, puzzle games, kart racers, even a pre-Wolfenstein first person shooter were all on their menu. They'd seen modest franchise success with Rick Dangerous, an Indiana Jones/Flash Gordonish platformer, and turned in a game tie-in for Steven Spielberg's Hook. Nothing terribly flashy came out of their Derbyshire offices, though the reviews always gave them the thumbs-up.

But by the mid-'90s, technology was rapidly changing what a videogame could do, and that gave one of Core's lead artists an idea for something more closely resembling an interactive movie than a video game. Early sketches detailed a 3D world of grid-based pyramids, temples, tombs and jungles for an equally 3D adventurer - not unlike a certain whip-wielding archeologist - to navigate. More accurately, the environment had to be solved, traps avoided and enemies plugged. Combat, puzzles and platforming, all in one game. The artist's name was Toby Gard.

Core had never even attempted to make a 3D game environment before. Few developers had. If that wasn't ambitious enough, Gard wanted his manly hero on-screen at all times. That meant creating a 3D game with a successful third person perspective, a formula the great Shigeru Miyamoto had struggled to crack for years.

Gard's excitement caught on fast. His project got the go-ahead. His hero didn't; it was exactly one lawsuit shy of being Dr. Henry Jones, Jr. himself. Looking to get as far from Raiders of the Lost Ark as possible, Gard suggested bumping one of his female character designs up to the lead role. At the time, females in games existed mostly as victims or hostages... nobody even considered asking male gamers to play as a girl. Core co-founder Jeremy Heath-Smith decided that made a great hook for a cutting-edge game, and Gard started drawing. Sociopathic blonds, muscle women, flat topped hip-hopsters and a Nazi-like militant in a baseball cap came and went. Eventually, they settled on a tough South American woman in a long braid and hot pants, willing to go to any lengths to win the greatest trophies lost to history. An Olympic-level athlete, an expert of antiquities, a born survivor. Gard named his creation Laura Cruz.

The name hit resistance from above. Core's parent company had recently been acquired by Eidos, a video compression and editing software company, and management wanted a more "UK-friendly" name. The six-person project team opened the Derby phone book and started calling out names. A vote chose the winner: Lara Croft.

Her background changed with her name. Lady Croft became an upper-crust thrillseeker, an 11th generation Countess who rejected a life of comfort, learning rugged self-reliance at an early age. It took Core just over 540 polygons to build their brassy explorer. Great care went into animating her. Her trademark braid had to be cut from the in-game avatar, but she walked, ran, jumped, grabbed, shot, dived, rolled, climbed and swam in the trade-off. The twin automags on her lovely hips never ran out of bullets, and the tiny magic carry-all lunchbox on her back always had room for another priceless artifact.

The lady looked impressive all over, far more realistic than other games even attempted. Complete realism wasn't possible, of course, and Gard intended Lara to have somewhat exaggerated dimensions from the start. While making test adjustments to her girlish figure, a slip of his mouse turned an intended 50% increase to her breast size into a 150% gain. It met with instant approval from the team before he could correct it.

That approval didn't transfer to Sony. Core finally had a game with serious reach and Eidos' marketing machine backing them to the hilt, but Sony passed on the beta. It just didn't impress them enough to allow it on the PlayStation.

Core went into overdrive. They tightened controls, hired Shelley Blond to give Lara a voice, added a compelling music score, and pushed the story forward through full motion video cutscenes, another rarely-seen ingredient. Gard's accidental "one-fifty" design made picking out a marketing strategy remarkably easy, and under Eidos' strict direction, the buzz started to build. When Tomb Raider made a second pass at Sony, it received an enthusiastic response. Lara wasn't in the PlayStation doghouse anymore.